Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.